Tribes of Midgard blends survival, crafting, and action in a cooperative Viking setting. But if you aren't matched with a helpful, communicative lobby, be prepared to spend long stretches of time engaging in the game's less fun activities.
If you are the type of player who can easily corral a group of friends or is prone to openly chatting in silent lobbies, Tribes of Midgard may be for you.
In fact, you’re the type of player who will likely enjoy the game the most.
Over my several dozen hours with Tribes of Midgard, the times I had the most fun were when I loaded into a match where several people were openly talking, whether it be shooting the shit, making dumb jokes, or actually compiling strategies. Because of the PlayStation 5 DualSense’s built-in mic, it’s easier for people to talk. I heard kids screaming, people speaking foreign languages, those jerks who blare music, and many who didn’t know they weren’t muted. Plenty of times I heard the constant vibration of another player’s controller as it echoed the footsteps of a Viking running across the landscape, feeling a bit crazy as it synced up with my own character’s movement.
Suffice it to say, if I loaded into a match and no one spoke after a few seconds, I bolted.
Tribes of Midgard is a frequently complex survival game that drops players into the world with very little idea of what to do. Players begin in a small town that is the last bastion for the Seed of Yggdrasil, the thing preventing vicious Jotnar from crashing into the lair of the gods and sparking Ragnarök. This humble village houses crafting stations where players can make armor, weapons, potions, building material, and invest in defenses to protect the Seed. Every night, a small army of Helthings rushes the Seed and depletes it of health. Eventually, a Jötun, a fabled giant slowly makes its way from an unknown part of the map to the Seed. Day after day, night after night, players set out into the world to gather materials and grow in power to push back the endless winter. And that, in a nutshell, is Tribes of Midgard‘s story and its gameplay loop.
A bulk of what players will do in Tribes of Midgard is survive. Combat is surprisingly humble but intricate in its own way. The game swiftly acclimates players to breaking down trees and gathering stone to craft an axe and a pickaxe. These two tools are then used to harvest more resources to craft base level armor and weapons to raise your character’s equipment level enough to survive against enemies.
Scattered across each randomly generated world are various tiers of materials that can be gathered. Mercifully, a player who stumbles into a high level area can harvest stronger resources but their tools will just break faster. Enemy camps house treasure chests containing helpful loot while a number of landmarks tantalize with potential rewards.
There is an overwhelming sense of directionless in the early parts of Tribes of Midgard before a player has the chance to fully acclimate to what is going on. The first handful of days are an absolute resource dump. Players will spend most of their time attempting not to stray too far from home, gathering enough to cobble together a weapon and armor. But after a few days, a blood moon will occur, signifying that exceptionally hard Helthings are going to attack.
Here, the game begins to bear its teeth, especially with a packed lobby. To maintain a sense of challenge, enemies scale in difficulty based on how many players are in a lobby. Though it may make sense for fights with giants and boss creatures, you better pray your whole team is nearby. Harder enemies in Tribes of Midgard are ruthless and have massive pools of health meant to be shaved off by full teams. In my rounds as a solo player, I just was not having fun with the loop because I never felt like I had a leg up.
Rapidly, the game’s difficulty begins to spike after a few days. Norsfell intelligently covered the map with fast travel shrines that make navigating to key points a breeze. However, this benefit only goes so far as players begin to drain a section of the map of resources. The second tier of crafting depends on silver, which is not the most common resource around. But without silver, better gear cannot be crafted.
After the first Jötun is defeated, Tribes of Midgard begins testing how well a lobby is playing together. It took me several rounds to realize that a resource chest in town is actually shared by every player. When crafting at a vendor, players can pull from their personal inventory and the team’s. Because I was unaware, I spent long stretches of time holding onto my random assortment of berries, entrails, minerals, and mystical talismans not knowing that the rest of my team would benefit from something I might have. When a team communicates, multiple groups of people can journey off into a part of the map to collect resources the entire team needs. In one of my favorite lobbies, we were asking what others needed to craft better gear and working towards a common goal. In the worst experiences, most hold on to their resources and an individual is forced to wander around searching for a laundry list of supplies.
Though it is always fun to engage in hearty teamwork, Tribes of Midgard is perhaps a bit too stingy with its seemingly endless amount of supplies and their various costs. To craft and upgrade, players will also need souls, which are obtained through killing enemies, as quest rewards, and from harvesting. While crafting stations and defenses at the village can be contributed to by all, it doesn’t help when a piece of gear is about to break and you don’t have the souls to repair it. Often I found that my team had an abundance of worthless materials and could never acquire enough to fully gear up properly.
A major progress check occurs after players defeat their third Jötun. Soon, more and more of the map becomes covered in snow and the temperatures begin to drop. To survive this endless winter, players need to craft cold resistant gear and potions–there’s also hot areas that require similar equipment–but the materials for this are primarily found in cold areas. In my best run that lasted 12 or 13 days, my team eventually escaped because we could not find the materials to equip the cold resistant gear and another sneaky teammate had taken the few essential materials needed to craft.
Survival games are frequently vague and secretive with crafting recipes and what players can actually discover in their deep worlds. Tribes of Midgard makes it obvious where most materials can be found and does not appear to have any secret recipes. However, there are public events and locales in the game that are not fully explained. The sense of discovery of working together to solve these riddles can be fun but I assume most players will just run to the internet to figure out what is going on in order to progress.
Still, progression in Tribes of Midgard can often be frustrating. Using a season pass model with earned levels, players can unlock cosmetic gear and starting loadouts to cut through a bit of the grind. But I found that even when spending over an hour in a single session, my season experience barely made a dent in one level. Worse yet, there’s no great reward for success or failure, nothing to give players that extra starting push. When I first earned a starting loadout of green gear, I was thrilled to be able to instantly go into lower level enemy camps and fight. But then I had to scavenge the ground for flint and branches to make tools because I couldn’t harvest otherwise. If other players had already got those materials, I had to go deeper into the map. Starting out with tools creates the opposite problem where you can harvest initially but spend forever getting the materials to craft equipment.
These issues cause the first few days of Tribes of Midgard to feel slow and the final days to feel heartbreaking if more and more people begin to leave the lobby. I admire the sense of progression in unlocking new character classes. Players have to accomplish certain tasks to open up classes that aren’t the Warrior or Ranger. Every class has a tiny skill tree that increases damage with certain weapons and unlocks helpful passive and active skills. While combat is fairly simple, it helps make the game feel a bit less tedious.
Visually, Tribes of Midgard benefits from its cel shaded graphics. It makes everything in the world stand out and gives a refreshing look at its giant bosses. I did find in my early days of playing that my character would at times rubber-band or receive a sudden burst of speed for no apparent reason. And though the designs for the randomly generated levels were often engaging, I would grow frustrated when encountering terrain I couldn’t cross unless I had a ramp that I built. Frequently I got stuck and had to die because I couldn’t teleport away.
Tribes of Midgard is far from a perfect survival game. While it maintains a steady loop for players to engage with, the process of scavenging, crafting, and building can be pretty boring during the first few days and relentless as deadly winter encroaches upon the player’s safe haven. Yet despite its flaws and lack of meaningful post-run progression, it’s hard to deny that when a full lobby of ten Vikings are working together, the game is at its strongest. Though there might be something for those players who prefer to be a bit lonely, the game’s large worlds may prove to be far too much to tackle when the difficulty ramps up.
